Before the “Dante” ad, before Carlos Danger, before the collapse of the lone female candidate in the race, there were three women steering the man on the cusp of becoming New York City’s next mayor toward victory.

They operate behind the scenes and only reluctantly speak to reporters about their roles. But the successful journey of Bill de Blasio, who’s likely to become Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s successor, rested in large measure on the trio – Emma Wolfe, Anna Greenberg and Rebecca Kirszner Katz.

Wolfe, who has been with de Blasio since 2009 in different capacities, is a veteran and widely-praised organizer, who has kept a deliberately low profile in a city filled with operatives looking for attention. Among the key strategies she helped devise was relying on an entirely volunteer operation to gather the more than 65,000 signatures de Blasio collected to get on the Democratic primary ballot – more than five times the number needed — and engaging voters early on.

“Emma basically was the campaign,” Greenberg said on a conference call with all three of the strategists.

Yet Greenberg, a pollster, was also key. She came on comparatively late – de Blasio didn’t conduct his first survey until late last year – but distilled the sense of alienation that African-American residents in particular had from the rest of the city during the Bloomberg era.

Kirszner Katz, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), was one of de Blasio’s first consultants, joining the campaign when he was polling in single digits in public surveys. She helped guide his media strategy, with a focus on niche media with an African-American focus that have a younger readership than more entrenched outlets, such as TheGrio.com, and on softer pieces about his family, and particularly his wife, in outlets like the New York Daily News.

Their prominence in the campaign represents an ethos that existed throughout the effort – women in positions of power, from de Blasio’s wife Chirlane, a longtime political operative, on down. The campaign’s first focused group of supporters was Women for de Blasio, a clear and early sign the campaign planned on ceding no ground to the lone woman in the race, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, as they tried to shatter long-held assumptions about identity politics in New York.

“We understood throughout that there would be a perception that we weren’t the frontrunner, that we were the underdog,” said Kirszner Katz, who added that the campaign functioned as a consensus meritocracy, with ideas debated and then agreed on by the team before they would proceed. They decided against traditional direct mail, saving their money for television and digital spending as well as field organizing.

“There was never any panicking,” said Kirszner Katz, despite “some frustration in the early months that things weren’t moving.”

Greenberg was hired after a meeting earlier in 2012 with de Blasio, who she’d never met before, and who drove her to Penn Station and gave her a hug before she went into the terminal. The first survey she took focused on issues and policies as opposed to the horse race.

At that point, there was no sense that Anthony Weiner was planning a comeback attempt, and in doing so, swamp the race’s media coverage.

The survey, Greenberg said, helped guide the campaign on “where do people want to see the city go” in the post-Bloomberg years. While de Blasio has always planned on making his opposition to the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” policing tactic a centerpiece of his campaign, it dovetailed with where wide swaths of the primary electorate stood.

“What I think worked well for us is that … a lot of areas where the mayor’s fallen short were the things Bill cares about,” she said. The other Democrats read the polling numbers and saw Bloomberg’s enduring popularity, despite opposition to some of his policies, and ran a stay-the-course campaign in many respects.

But Greenberg said the polling reflected a “very deep…level of alienation and anger” among African-Americans, stretching back to the Rudy Giuliani years.

“Bloomberg and [NYPD Commissioner Ray] Kelly have good numbers, but it wasn’t something just about the horserace,” she said. Voters “liked certain things that [Bloomberg] did….but they also felt like he was an out-of-touch billionaire who was driven by the things he was interested in.”

Initially, Wolfe was the center of the team, managing the day-to-day operations when the campaign was basically a shell. She left her post with de Blasio’s Public Advocate office, where she’d been since working on his 2009 campaign for that job, and began to put together Team Blasio.

Wolfe’s early work was with Katz and her Hilltop Public Solutions colleague Nick Baldick. They began working with other consultants later, including New York labor-centric firm Berlin Rosen, and ad-maker John Del Cecato, whose “Dante” ad featuring de Blasio’s Afro-ed son is credited with breaking through the noisy campaign. Operative Phil Walzak headed the communications team, and campaign manager Bill Hyers, who worked for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and is widely respected among Democrats, was also brought in.

Meanwhile, as their campaign’s messaging was formed – it remained unchanged throughout – Wolfe was leading a “lean and mean classic organizing model,” according to Kirszner Katz.

“I think there were a few critical elements in the organization of the [voter] outreach,” said Wolfe, adding that de Blasio is a former organizer who “gets the art and science of organizing. And he is also numbers-driven” in terms of metrics and data.

Adding to the challenge for the campaign was the fact that organized labor, which has historically been a turnout driver for candidates in Democratic primaries in New York City, was split among the candidates. De Blasio ultimately got the endorsement of the most get-out-the-vote-efficient union, SEIU Local 1199, but that came much later. Before that, the campaign staffers were organizing on their own.

Quinn’s operatives would talk about her finely-tuned GOTV model. But as it turned out, their claims of a strong organization were similar to those made by Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012 – boasts based on numbers of doors knocked, for instance, as opposed to actual voter who were contacted and persuaded.

The campaign felt very strong, Wolfe said, after it was able to gather well over 60,000 signatures to get on the ballot, using only volunteers as opposed to Democratic clubs, unions or paid petition-carriers.

In the meantime, Kirszner Katz, working with other strategists on the campaign, focused on going “beyond just the daily papers,” getting attention with a digital-focused strategy, social media and in some of the neighborhood papers.

That was especially true of Brooklyn papers, which covered de Blasio’s arrest in protest of a hospital closure there. That arrest, derided at the time as small-bore for a potential future mayor, ended up serving him well.

The take-away for voters, Kirszner Katz said, was that “he’s brave…when he believes in something [he fights].”

Greenberg said that their own internal polls always reflected that Weiner wasn’t built for the long haul, and that they had a path, even when the public surveys showed something different. And the media attention de Blasio received, combined with his message and the organizational muscle Wolfe and Hyers pulled together, was key to that.

“It was shocking, the movement we saw before we spent any money on paid media,” said Kirszner Katz.